Meaningful Meme: Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories

May 10, 2008 – 12:09 am

lockers-by-steven-fernandez

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose - voluntary, as usual - could have more social value than the bevy of “Stop Bullying!” messages we most often see in response to this ugly subject. Here’s Jack:

Clay,

I googled bullying stories because I wanted something to help me through troubles that I am currently facing in ninth grade. “Stop bullying!” sites really didn’t help me. This was just the kind of story I was looking for. I get called names feverishly because I didn’t make the best impression first semester. I try not to care what other people think of me but it feels like I am always watching my back.

Anyways, this story was very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for sharing. It helped substantially. [Emphasis added.]

I’ve already thanked Jack, but I want to thank him again. He confirms that for him, at least, “Stop Bullying” messages may be nice and all, but they don’t do much to comfort those trying to cope with being bullied.

I’m not saying anti-anything messages have no positive value. I’m just saying they often fail to help the victims of the thing being opposed. Telling bullies not to bully may be worth the effort, though it’s apparently predicated on the dubious belief that it’s effective to appeal to the compassionate side of bullies, who in my experience have almost always been a pretty heartless bunch. Bullies enjoy psycho-social benefits from bullying - profits, in a sense - in the same way arms dealers do from selling weapons. Appeals to delicate instincts require delicate audiences, and delicacy is a thing usually absent from these hardened types.

But as Jack testifies, just hearing Bullied Success Stories - that survival is worth it and life gets better? That’s a speech-act worth performing.

So the Meme: Share Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories

I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story - literally, a story - of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.

That’s one way to do it. Other ways:

  • a blog post
  • a webcam video
  • a Skypecast
  • a Comic Life or photo-essay
  • a VoiceThread
  • [your idea here]

If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.

I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying - and come on, it’s been with us as long as war - one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.

I often throw dreamy ideas like this out on this blog, and they land with a thud. This one seems a likely candidate as the latest in that series. But I hope not. My bullying podcast gets a surprising number of visits from people googling “real life bullying stories” and such, and it gets downloaded quite a bit too.

So there is a need.

And instead of putting more energy into “stop bullying” sermons (which I’m not saying we should stop), we can maybe devote it to stories of hope.

I know it’s a busy time, so if you can only get around to it later - this summer, even - that’s fine. Just link here whenever it’s done. If we get enough of these, we can make a permanent site for them on a wiki, or even a dedicated blog.

And by the way: this offer is open to any students out there with anything to say as well. I’d love to host a Skype conference call about this topic.

Photo: Locker by Steven Fernandez

Clay Burell | bullying, digital storytelling, meme, podcast, video, writing | Comments (14)

Friday Funny: How Sex Education Promotes Abstinence

May 8, 2008 – 11:22 pm

From my Quotiki sidebar widget:

Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools will promote promiscuity. With our education system? If we promote promiscuity the same way we promote math or science, they’ve got nothing to worry about.
- Beverly Mickins
I’m telling you, there’s magic in these random quote widgets - especially when, as in Quotiki, you get to select and add the ones your widget displays.
Clay Burell | fluff and fun, math, science | Comments (8)

Aggregators as Couches, Comments as Salons

May 8, 2008 – 11:01 am

Another limitation of RSS readers I’ve often griped about before: with a few exceptions (Bloglines for one), they exclude comment threads from the feed. This sends entirely the wrong message: that the posts are the main thing, and the writer of the blog is the expert.

I operate on the opposite assumption: I post my thoughts or questions, and expect the comments to lead to better and new understandings - and that’s what often happens. RSS readers miss all of that.

So just for the record, though I haven’t written a new post in four days, I’ve been busy reading and replying to the conversations in three recent posts - A Sunday Science Sermon (68 comments about what “knowing” means), Muhammad Ali: D- Student? Or F- School? (90 comments about whether schools sabotage the futures of smart non-writerly communicators), and For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging (45 comments on whether non-homework blogs should be pushed on all or pulled for the few).

I say this simply to invite those who never leave their readers to take a stroll into planet comment, where the real learning - dialogical, challenging, mutually sharpening - takes place.  It’s a fairly new development on this blog, this type of discussion, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I’m dealing this week with all sorts of trips to embassies and immigration offices (the legal hangover of the marriage party), so no new posts. But you can catch me and many smart, engaged people in the comments.

Come on - don’t be an RSS potato. Get out and mix a bit.

Clay Burell | blogging, writing | Tagged with , | Comments (8)

A Sunday Science Sermon

May 4, 2008 – 11:48 am

secular-nonsecular-nonsequitur

[Before I launch into the statistics, I want to urge you to watch the YouTube video at the bottom of this post. It’s a beautiful testament to the scientific method. In it, a scientist proves Darwin right on a hypothesis that, when Darwin was alive, earned him ridicule. The proof took 150 years to come to light - and it does so in that video.]

Damned Statistics

The crisis in scientific illiteracy should be a well-known fact to educated Americans, but just in case, a few statistics from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’s 1991-93 International Social Survey Program (ISSP):

  • Percentage Saying “I know God exists and I have no doubts about it”
    • United States: 62.8% - ranks 3rd under the Philippines and Poland. (Britain, by comparison, ranks 13th at 23.8%, and even Israel is less certain about this “knowledge,” at 43%, than the U.S.)
  • Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe “The Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word”
    • United States: 33.5% - ranks 3rd, again under the Philippines and Poland. (Again, Britain, by comparison, ranks 17th at 8%, and Israel ranks 6th at 26.7%.)
  • Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “The Devil”
    • United States: a whopping 44.5% - ranks 1st, this time, right above the Philippines and Poland. (Britain, by comparison, ranks 10th at 12.7%, and Israel ranks 11th at 12.6%.)
  • Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “Hell”
    • United States: a whopping 49.6% - ranks 1st, again, right above Northern Ireland and the Philippines. (Britain, with 12.8%, ranks 10th, while Israel ranks 5th at 22.5%.)
  • Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “Religious Miracles”
    • United States ranks first, at 45.6%, above Northern Ireland and Ireland. (Britain ranks 13th with 15.3%, and Israel ranks 7th with only 26.4%.)

I frame these statistics in terms of “scientific illiteracy” because it seems clear that a basic understanding of what we mean by “knowing” (as opposed to “having faith”) is lacking among those saying they “know God exists.” Similarly, those who “definitely believe” in the ontological reality of “the Devil,” “Hell,” and “Religious Miracles” betray a lack of understanding of what, in the International Baccalaureate program’s “Theory of Knowledge” class, we call “Justified True Belief.” (How is “definite” belief any different, subjectively, than believing we “know,” since “definite” implies no doubt?). Finally, the fundamentalist belief that every word of the Bible is “literally” true, as I read it, suggests a belief that the contradictory creation myths in that book’s first two pages (Genesis Books 1 and 2) are to be taken as scientific, cosmological explanations on the level of contemporary physics.

The ISSP survey seems to corroborate my “scientific illiteracy” frame by including in its survey questions that measure each respondent’s understanding of basic evolutionary theory:

  • Ranking of 21 Nations on Knowledge Question about Human Evolution:

Evolution Knowledge Rankings

The United States, as you can see, finished dead last out of 21 countries. A 44% grade on this national science test literally shows that America scores an “F” on its report card for science class. (Britain gets a C, and non-monotheistic Japan and then-Soviet satellite E. Germany score a solid B-. Remarkable, when you remember this is a survey of the general populace, and not just the educated elite.)

I know this data is 15 years old, but more recent data from 2005, as I’ve reported before, shows “that the United States ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory among [34] nations polled,” and “that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory’s validity has increased over the past 20 years.” We beat Turkey in that study, but Bulgaria beat us.

A Testament to Science and Darwin’s Prophecy Hypothesis Come True

Just watch it. Science teachers and Theory of Knowledge teachers, your students should love this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMVN1EWxfAU

Two Short Stories: Why I’m Writing This

There’s so much muddying of the scientific waters from proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design going on in America. Many of our edubloggers are guilty of that. In my book, no responsible progressive will stay silent and cede the battle for scientific literacy to the forces of medievalism out a sense of social niceness. The stakes are too vital. Call me a crusader for knowledge - or just call me a teacher.

Besides that, I had two recent experiences that struck me with enough force to mention them here:

One: The Neglected Healer

My mother-in-law suffered a catastrophic stroke last Sunday morning. My wife and I rushed to the hospital and joined her family in the Intensive Care Unit in what we thought was our final goodbye to that sweet woman. (She survived, thank goodness, though twice the doctors told us her chances were less than 20%.)

After saying the only words I figured this Korean woman, who speaks no English, would understand - “We love you. It’s okay. We love you. It’s okay.” - I stepped back to let the other family members in.

Two of them bent over her and started praying intensely in Korean. I listened to the “hallelujah’s” and “amen’s” with my ears as I watched the I.V. tubes and medical monitors with my eyes.

Right afterward, the surgeon who’d just operated on my mother-in-law’s brain spoke to the entire family. They hung on his every word. When he was finished, I saw no indication of gratitude or thanks to this man who, through the power of science, had just opened my mother-in-law’s skull and saved her life with science’s healing hands.

I don’t mean to attack prayer here. I simply mean to point out that science saved this woman. Her family didn’t take her to a priest for healing. Yet they gave credit to the priest’s paradigm instead of the scientist’s.

I wish I had a Korean translation of cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett’s beautiful essay, “Thank Goodness,” written after surviving

a nine-hour surgery, in which [his] heart was stopped entirely and [his] body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping

so I could share it with that doctor. (See this post - one of my favorites on this blog - for more on that.)

Two: The Medieval “A” Students

My “Advanced Placement” seniors - 18-year-olds now, ending their K-12 education presumably ready to enter many of America’s “elite” (if you believe the hype) universities - and I recently had a class discussion about what scientists are projecting about the future of our planet. One of the students brought up the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’ve been “proven true” - according to something she saw on TV, I think. All the other students in the class chimed in with the same enthusiastic credulity about Nostradamus as the first student. There were no skeptical rebuttals.

I was aghast.

That moment was not uncommon. I’m tempted to say, when it comes to evidence that schools succeed in training students to think critically, that that moment was the norm. (Other teachers, please weigh in here. Is my case different from yours?)

It left me wondering how, after 12 years of daily incarceration and nightly homework, even the students with the highest grades show such an inability to think. The easy answer, as regular readers who know me will predict I’d say, is that the students aren’t thinking about learning all these years, but about making grades.

What answers do you have?

–

Photo: secular, non-secular, non sequitur by Dean Forbes

Related: All posts tagged “Religion“

Clay Burell | history, religion, school reform, science | Comments (72)

For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging

May 1, 2008 – 5:29 am

de-petale-by-christiane-michaud

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription - well worth it - required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that

[t]eens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, or does it imply that some people think that The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some Road to Damascus experience that magically converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people to all become economists when they’re given their first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that all students are going to become writers because of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled need to write. And that’s a limited commodity now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this further bit of non-”news,” which this time, though still making me chuckle, also quickens my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

Teen bloggers, however, write more frequently both online and offline, the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: “Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who write frequently “both online and offline.” I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling teens who write a lot, with and without blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you with me in wanting to correct people who call you a “blogger” - some person who “makes blogs,” apparently, like a designer makes designs and a reporter makes reports - by telling them: “Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the practice. Writing bloggers are writers, photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

Teen writers, however, write more frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs.

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside of school for personal reasons” actually write on their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! Bad air! It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because schools make them, but because they’re writers. Breathe in the perfume, folks - we’re in the rose-garden now of flowering young writers.untitled-rose-by-rosemary*

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re the ones who probably want to be taught about ways to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are born equal, but natural differences create a “natural aristocracy” - one having nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that naturally) - I believe the same is true in the classroom. A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her - who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal pages having nothing to do with homework - will find not only my door open during lunch and after school, but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . who interest me, . . those who have the will to write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that these young writers are writing not, as most of the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” customers in our classrooms do (and as the students in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, go to a better college, get a better job, so I can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. They write for the pleasure in the present, not the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting with it in the classroom, of the value and place of blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective “advanced blogging” class. But we need a better word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a word, “blah - geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteursrose-for-you-by-lyubov through podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual communicators through photo and computer graphic, fine arts and video blogging. So “advanced digital communication,” then?

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve - the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign:

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working - making perfume.

Images:

Relevant posts:

Clay Burell | 1to1 laptop, blogging, creativity, language arts, lessons, professional development, project-based learning, school reform, teaching, web2.0, writing | Tagged with , , , , | Comments (52)